One final thought re:polling. It is quite easy to say you’re going to vote to kick an honorable wartime President out of office out of shear spite, quite another thing to actually push the pin through the chad and do it. That alone has got to be worth a few percent. It looks like that dynamic just played out in Australia with a solid re-election of Howard, despite the poll predictions for a closer race.
Russell Wardlow expressed similar ideas in this post.
Excerpt:
[P]eople are more willing to talk about or consider voting for John Kerry or Democrats in general (a la 2002) when the decision is still safely in the future. But sitting there in the booth, the importance and reality of voting for a candidate deemed more credible and clear-sighted on national security becomes more stark and more apparent. And there's also the fact that lifelong Dems will be much more hesitant to say they're voting for a Republican (especially one as reviled by the Dem base as Bush) to their friends or a pollster, but in the secrecy of the voting booth, no such concerns are present.
So, take that for what it's worth: despite the current numbers, I would hazard a guess that Bush is going to pull out an unexpectedly strong win on November 2.
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